


Flare

by banshee_in_the_dark



Series: Ignite Series [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Banshee Lydia Martin, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Mild Smut, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-28
Updated: 2014-08-28
Packaged: 2018-02-15 03:12:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2213628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/banshee_in_the_dark/pseuds/banshee_in_the_dark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some sparks burn the brightest (but not enough to chase the shadows away).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flare

**Author's Note:**

> Well. I'm sorry it took me so long to finish this part, while I knew where I wanted to take it the words wouldn't come out right and it was quite frustrating >_

He wakes up to the glorious sight of Lydia coming out of the bathroom, wearing nothing but a poor excuse of a towel wrapped around her. Her hair is still wet, slicked back from her face revealing her rosy cheeks, flush from the heat of her shower. The steam settles around her like an aura and he has the irrational feeling of being before a goddess of the woods, walking on dainty feet over crushed leaves and dirt with the fog as her sentinel and his soul at her beck and call.

“Morning beautiful,” he calls, sitting up and interlacing his fingers behind his head before remembering he’s still recovering from a bullet wound and a dislocated shoulder so _ouch, fucking dammit_. He lowers his arms biting back a curse and settles back against the headboard to enjoy the show.

“Morning,” Lydia blows him a kiss, turns around and drops her towel treating him to the unhindered view of her smooth back and her pert, perfectly shaped bottom.

She leans forward, doubling at the waist to pick up the towel and rising back up slowly. He growls low in his throat. This is a ritual they know all too well, teasing one another shamelessly, and their enjoyment in the little games they play has never dwindled, not after all these years. Stiles sees her sneak a glance at him as she pulls a bra and panty set from the top drawer. He pretends not to notice, moving his head sideways to catch a glimpse of her full breasts and simultaneously burying his hand under the thin covers and fisting his rapidly hardening cock.

Her breath hitches and she completely misses her mark as she tries to swing her foot through the panty leg, twice, following the unhurried movement of his hand under the covers.

She snaps herself out it, flustered and Stiles grins in victory.

“None of that,” Lydia declares, efficiently pulling up her panties and reaching for the bra. His breath catches looking at her. The light blue material looks fantastic against her translucent skin. “I just had a shower and I need to change your bandage before you take one as well.”

Stiles looks down at his arm, a dried, dark red spot in stark contrast to the white bandage. It doesn’t hurt too bad – honestly his shoulder is throbbing more and more with every minute so everything else kind of feels numb in comparison. He’s gonna have to take something for the pain.

“We also left the living room and the kitchen in a mess last night, and I have laundry to do and your shift starts in a few hours, although I really think you should call in sick. I’m sure your dad will understand.”

He sits up straight when she mentions the living room and laundry. Lydia doesn’t notice, she’s still mumbling under her breath as she pulls out different items of clothing from the closet, and he’s thankful. Keeping things from her is hard enough. If she detects anything is amiss she will doggedly insist that he tell her what’s up and he can’t lie, not to her. His pants from last night are lying in the living room and if she gets to them first with the intention of putting them in the washer, she _will_ find the engagement ring. She is anal about checking pockets. Once he missed a piece of paper in the front pocket of a flannel shirt and the entire load of laundry came up with white paper dusting all over it. She didn’t talk to him for two days when that happened.

He can’t let her find the ring. His proposal might’ve been ruined before he even got a chance to take her out to dinner, but he when he finally asks her to marry him it’s not going to be because she found the ring by chance. And it’s definitely not happening the morning after he almost got killed and she nearly killed herself trying to keep him alive.

“Hey,” he slips off the bed, unconcerned with his naked state, although he does perk up at the appreciating look Lydia gives him, and wraps his arms around her. He kisses her forehead, playing with the wet tendrils of her hair teasing her waist. “We didn’t get to celebrate our anniversary last night. How about after you take care of my arm and I shower, you get a basket ready and we have a little picnic? I’ll do the laundry,” he offers, kissing a path from her forehead down her cheek and ending at her mouth.

“I like that idea,” she nods, eyes twinkling and smiling softly. “But what about the hunters? They could still be out there. Is it safe?”

“I think we ran them out of town. But you tell me.”

He stares at her as her gaze grows unfocused, pupils dilating and lids lowering tiredly. Her breathing becomes slower, even paced as if she’s sleeping. Stiles would worry if he hadn’t seen her using her powers about a million times before. It took her years to hone them to the point when she can focus and use them at will, and all her hard work had nearly cost Lydia her sanity before she learned to control it.

“They’re gone,” she declares after a few seconds that felt like hours.

Her frown doesn’t convince him. “But?”

Lydia shakes her head slowly. “It’s nothing to worry about, I don’t think…”

“You don’t look like you’re not worrying,” Stiles insists.

“I just feel a little off. It’s probably an after effect from last night,” she shrugs. Lydia looks up at him and wraps her arms behind his neck. “Let’s get started on your arm. I’m gonna need you to distract me later.”

Lydia’s relieved when she sees his bullet wound is not infected. She did her best last night cleaning it up, but she’s not a doctor and she was riding one of the worst aftermaths of her banshee spells she can remember, so her wits were a bit scattered and she worried she might’ve overlooked something. Even the slightest thread of fabric inside the wound could spurt an infection, but for the looks of it, Stiles was well on his way to recovery. The skin around the round hole wasn’t red or hot, just a bit swollen which was expected, and he didn’t bleed when she peeled off the bandage and started cleaning him.

She still insists he takes some broad-spectrum antibiotics they keep in the first aid kit before he jumps in the shower.

She counts to three after she hears the shower start running, waiting.

“Dun dun dundun dun dundundun. DUN DUN dundundun dun dundunduuUN. DUNDUN DUN DUNDUN DUN DUN.”

Lydia grins widely. Without fail, Stiles always sings the Game of Thrones theme song in the shower no matter how many times she tells him he sounds terrible and, as usual, she ends up reluctantly humming along as she gets dressed.

She selects a pair of high-waist denim shorts and mesh green top, loose and comfortable for a picnic in the woods. A hum of electricity, barely there, tickles her when she brushes her fingers over her abdomen as she drags the zipper up. She pulls her hair up in a messy bun and leaves the room with a pair strappy sandals dangling from her fingers just as the shower stops running, making her way downstairs.

Her phone is on the kitchen island, battery dead and smeared with blood from the night before. With her lips grimly pursed, Lydia plugs it on the outlet, taking an antibacterial wipe from the first drawer and wiping the stains off the white casing. The sight of dried blood turns her stomach, an unnecessary reminder that she could’ve lost Stiles last night. She scrubs and scrubs until there’s no trace of it left, wishing she could wipe away the residual fear just as easily.

“How’s the picnic basket going?”

Lydia turns around, startled, finds Stiles strutting across the kitchen carrying the laundry basket into the back room where they keep the washer and drier.

“On it,” she calls faintly over her shoulder, leaving the now immaculate phone on the counter and making a beeline for the fridge and taking out the ingredients to make some sandwiches.

She remembers to take her pill just as they’re finished loading up the Jeep to head out, so she runs back into the house to take it as Stiles waits patiently outside for her.

There’s a moment, with the tiny little pill heavy like lead on her palm, where she has the irrational urge to just throw them all away, but it’s brief. She snaps herself out of it, rolling her eyes at herself and her silly, hyperactive imagination and chugs the pill down with a sip of water.

She’s on the phone with her mother when the crying begins.

“Is there a baby there with you?” she asks, holding her phone to her ear with her shoulder as she balances her purse and travel mug with one hand and opening the door of her car with the other.

“No, but I have the TV on. Why?” Natalie asks.

“Nothing, I thought I heard something. So the new job is going well?”

“Oh, it’s fantastic. It’s the hellish weather I can’t get used to…”

It doesn’t happen again until a few days later when she’s having lunch with Kira. They have a standing weekly date and they always meet at a little café halfway between the lab and Kira’s office. She’s waiting for their food while Kira uses the restroom, pointedly staring as the waitress loads the tray behind the counter with Kira’s chicken salad and Lydia’s quesadillas. Her stomach rumbles embarrassingly loud as she mentally urges the woman to hurry up. She’s starving and she practically salivates thinking about the cheesy ambrosia coming her way.

A soft whimper rings in her ears and she drags her eyes from the food, searching the café for the child as the whimpering grows in intensity. At first she can’t find the source of the noise, even as it becomes louder and escalates to full-fledged wails. Every cry stabs her heart and she feels desperation rise within her, skin crawling uncomfortably as tears threaten to fall and the urge to find the child and soothe them drives through her powerfully.

The room spins around her. _Where are you?_ Her mind cries. _I can’t find you._

“Lydia?” Kira warily touches her shoulder pulling her from her frantic thoughts.

With a start, Lydia realizes she’s standing in the middle of the café with no recollection whatsoever of standing up and leaving their table.

“A baby is crying,” she says, her voice hoarse to her ears. “I think he’s alone. I…”

_He needs me._

Kira worries her lip and gently pulls her to their table where the waitress is setting their plates. The bell at the door tingles indicating a newcomer. Lydia snaps her head in that direction before easing back to her seat, seeing a harried-looking woman entering the café with a fussing infant wrapped in a yellow blanket. A man follows her carrying a folded stroller and a diaper bag slung over his shoulder and they head for the nearest empty table.

Lydia tears her gaze from them and finds Kira smiling comfortingly at her across the table. “See? I bet he’s okay. Let’s eat.”

“Yeah,” Lydia shakes her head, clearing the fog from her mind and reaches for her food. “I’m starving.”

Kira watches her as she bites into her lunch with uncharacteristic gusto. “I thought you sworn off Mexican food since we went there our junior year,” she notes.

“Can you blame me? I got food poisoning. Stiles had to pull over so I could throw up every other mile the entire way back home,” Lydia says between bites, moaning indecently as her taste buds explode with every morsel. Kira arches her brow, pointedly looking at the food Lydia is consuming shockingly fast. “What? I can’t change my mind?”

Kira holds her palms up placating and laughs, smoothly veering the conversation to the subject of Melissa’s upcoming birthday and the surprise party Scott wants to throw her.

Lydia never particularly cared about children one way or the other. She never had any cousins and being an only child assured her she’d never be an aunt either. Stiles and all their friends are similar like that, having no siblings, with close relationships with their parents but little to no relatives outside their immediate family units and therefore no contact with kids younger than them. The closest she ever got a child is with Derek and Braeden’s little girl Nora but it’s not like she babysits for the couple, not even when Braeden is out of town on a job, and she only spends time with her when the whole pack is there.

It’s not like she doesn’t like kids. She’ll love her own, she’s sure, when they come but it’s not something she thinks about generally. Or, she didn’t use to.

_Now_ she thinks about them, constantly. Babies. She’s oddly attuned to them too, can sense a baby in distress before even seeing them or hearing them and when she sees a baby she’s inexplicably drawn to them, cooing and fawning over them. She strikes conversations with their mothers and suddenly thinking of their ages in terms of months and weeks comes naturally, appreciating the changes in their development. She’s never changed a diaper but she becomes an expert in diaper rashes and their treatment practically overnight, instinctively. And the temperature of the formula? That’s a tricky one, really, but when she turns the faucet in the kitchen _just so_ she can reach the correct temperature.  

They ask her if she has any kids, if she’s expecting, if she wants them. It shouldn’t be so hard to answer ‘no’ to the first two questions and ‘someday’ to the third one. But it is. Feeling like she’s lying makes no sense but the guilt eats at her still.

On a Tuesday, she finds herself doing her grocery shopping and before she knows it she has the cart full of baby wipes and Johnson’s Baby wash and she’s perusing the prices of diapers.

The color of the spare bedroom at home, the one Stiles turned into a his official home office slash occult studies room slash man cave irritates her when she spends time there (and she finds herself spending increasingly more time in that room when she’s at home even though she has no reason whatsoever for being there) and so the following Friday she orders a lovely corn colored stripped wallpaper online on a whim. It’s a surprise, to put it mildly, when Stiles comes home a few days later to pick up a file he forgot and he finds a guy pulling out the old carpet there and the room half-way covered in the new wall paper.

(She had to pay the guy double to finish the job after Stiles arrested him for breaking and entering and hauled him to the station. He was very understanding, considering.)

(Stiles didn’t talk to her for almost a week. He didn’t care so much for the remodeling but boxing his Stars Wars memorabilia and shoving it in the attic? _That_ he had a hard time forgiving.)

The dreams are weird too, she’ll admit, in a sort of hazy, convoluted way. She dreams about a weight in her stomach, most of the time, but also in her arms sometimes and, less frequently, curling softly in her hand and pulling her along somewhere bright and warm.

But some dreams she wakes up scared and drenched in cold sweat from, with tears in her eyes and a scream in her throat. Those she can’t recall no matter how hard she tries and more than once Stiles has to shake her awake.

(They don’t go back to sleep after those nightmares. It’s like the night she almost lost him, her need to be close, to be _one_ with Stiles is so great she holds to the tether with a mental grip but feels herself slip more and more and fears one day soon she’ll lose her hold and he won’t be able to pull her back.)

Stiles worries, like he always does, and spends countless nights reading up on bestiaries, consulting with Deaton and other emissaries he’s acquainted with to figure out why, precisely, her control of her powers is slipping. They aren’t much help. Banshees are a secretive lot, they say, and not much is known of them. Lydia can attest to that. The few banshees she’s come in contact with over the years (personally, face to face, not just the ones she hears when she tunes in to their frequency) either didn’t seem to know where their powers come from and how they work and weren’t particularly interested about finding out, or were infuriatingly mysterious and not at all forthcoming with information. The only useful things Lydia really learned from them were the stark differences between their powers and hers.

Her grandmother would’ve told her everything she knew, if she had the chance. On a Thursday Lydia goes to the old lake house and tries to talk to her but made no contact with her except for a soft warm glow that hugged her and comforted her, giving her hope that, somehow, despite whatever is happening to her, everything would be alright.

It isn’t.

Or, no, okay. Maybe she’s exaggerating. Maybe she’s going through a power growth spurt of sorts, making her control slip. She’s always known she was different from other banshees so maybe that’s got something to do as well. Maybe it’s the tether growing stronger. Maybe nearly losing Stiles messed up with her wiring and gave her some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that affects her powers. If a werewolf won’t heal for a psychosomatic cause who’s to say a banshee can’t start having weird, fanciful dreams and become hypersensitive to infants after a traumatic event?

“I still say we should drive upstate and see that banshee we met when we had that ghoul problem,” Stiles insists after spitting out mouthwash on the bathroom sink while Lydia carefully applies moisturizer on her face.

“I doubt she’ll be of help but I’ll give her a call,” Lydia concedes, tiredly.

“Will you actually call her or just do your voodoo thing and next we’ll know one of the deputies will find her walking down the highway barefoot on her way here? If it’s all the same to you I’d rather you used the phone. The guys at the station still talk about Meredith after all these years.”

Lydia rolls her eyes, rubbing the leftover lotion on her hands. “Fine. I wouldn’t want her to come here anyway. Last time she moved all our furniture and hid hex bags all over the house. I keep finding them in the most random places to this day.”

“They were for protection and they smelled nice,” Stiles points out idly. He dries his mouth with a hand towel, watching her on the mirror as she moves to the tub and opens the tap adjusting the water temperature. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

“You go ahead,” she says softly. “I’ll be there in a little while.”

“Okay,” he smacks an open mouthed kiss on her shoulder before exiting the bathroom and Lydia turns her head to watch him go. HIs messy head and his hand rubbing the back of his neck is the last thing she sees.

The darkness consumes her. Cold on her back, hands everywhere, pulling, shaking, claws dragging her down. Screams pierce her ears, louder than the wailing symphony of crying babies around her. Hands painfully pull her hair in all directions and her lungs burn, heavy and tired.

“LYDIA!”

She realizes she’s the one screaming a split second before the sound dies in her throat. Her fingers twitch, numb and tangled in her wet hair and she slowly pulls her hands before her eyes. There’s blood under her fingernails and a steady sting in several parts of her scalp. She instinctively knows the blood is hers and the realization that she hurt herself, somehow, is hard to process.

Shivers wreck her damp body. The bathroom is a mess around her, there’s water everywhere. The distant sound of water pouring tells her the tap is still running and a quick glance to the overflowing tub beside her confirm her suspicion.

She notices Stiles looming over her last. His arms are around her too, pulling her over his lap and he brushes the hair from her face. She has a hard time focusing on his features but the worry and fear are evident in him.

“What happened?” she stutters. The jarring sound of her chattering teeth suddenly fills her ears.

“You were under the water. Lydia,” his hands open and close around her, run over her shoulders and back frantically. “Lyds, you were gone. What _the fuck_ were you doing?”

The anger in his voice is like a slap across the face. “I was taking a bath,” she says defensively. That’s the last thing she remembers, running the bath and thinking about which salts she wanted to use this time to relax.

“Your legs were hooked on the side of the tub and your back flat on the bottom,” he spits out. “You left the water running and when I came to see what took you so long you’d been under the water god knows how long. What were you thinking?”

“I – I – ” Lydia swallows with difficulty staring up at Stiles’ terrified, furious gaze. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember getting into the tub, I swear. I wouldn’t do that.”

He touches his forehead to hers. Warm wetness spreads through her cheeks but she can’t tell the difference between her tears and his.

“You started screaming when I pulled you out, and kicking and fighting me,” he shakes his head, face scrunched up in a pained expression. “You scared me Lydia. What the fuck happened?”

A sob escapes from her, its intensity so unexpected she hurts from shaking so badly. “They want to take him away,” she hears herself say, but doesn’t recognize her own voice, feels trapped and powerless as her mouth forms word she doesn’t understand. “They know. They know.”

The darkness claims her again, but this time she’s conscious of it. She welcomes it, truly. With this particular darkness comes rest and quiet and warmth. They can’t get to her, to him, not now.

Not yet.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't kill me I know it's cruel but cliffhangers are a necessary evil!!
> 
> Please take a moment to comment. Your feedback gives me life. I write for YOU guys and I love hearing your thoughts XD


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